Baghdad, Arizona: Where Iraqi Pilots Learn to Fight ISIS

Right now, on a military base in Tucson, American fighter pilots are teaching a group of elite Iraqi Airmen how to fly their country's first F-16s. Their ultimate target: ISIS.

By
Elliott Woods

Dec 2, 2015

Over four days in early September, Iraqi fighter pilots carried out fifteen air strikes against Islamic State targets in Salah ad Din and Kirkuk provinces, just north of Baghdad. The story didn't get much play. Five short sentences in the Associated Press, with a canned quote by a Pentagon spokesman and few details. None of the major news networks paid any mind. The Guardian, one of Britain's leading daily newspapers, presented a marginally fuller picture: The planes were American-made F-16s, among thirty-six ordered by the Iraqi government back in 2011. The United States had repeatedly delayed delivery of the jets, citing safety issues as the Islamic State group, or ISIS, became a direct threat to Balad Air Base—the jets' future home. Of course, ISIS was the very reason Iraq now needed the planes urgently, and eventually the first four arrived in July. Still, The Guardian largely dismissed the delivery of the F-16s—the first ever in the history of the Iraqi Air Force—saying they would not be "a game changer" in the fight against ISIS.

It had been more than a year since ISIS had captured Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, prompting the intervention of a coalition led by the U.S. Air strikes had targeted ISIS territories for much of that year. So you could understand how the news media didn't think fifteen more carried out by four Iraqi planes would change the fight in a fundamental way. But how those pilots came to be flying those airplanes in the skies over their home country—that was a big change indeed. The men flying the F-16s had recently returned to Iraq from a base in Tucson, Arizona, another desert more than seventy-five hundred miles from Baghdad, where they had completed more than three years of training with United States Air Force pilots. They had lived among Americans, eating tacos at Mexican cantinas, trying to follow the NBA. They had missed their families, their own beds, the mothers' home-cooked meals, their hometowns. These men, who back in Iraq had learned how to fly in Cessnas and Beechcraft T-6 single-engine prop training planes, now knew how to control the mighty F-16 Fighting Falcon, a multimillion-dollar, Lockheed Martin–built military combat machine that can reach speeds of 1,500 miles per hour.

An F-16 in the 162nd Wing's "hush house," a soundproof hangar where engines are tested.

Elliott Woods

And they weren't the only ones. Back in America there were others. Around twenty. Iraqis just like them, learning to fly F-16s, training to fight ISIS. Though that number was one less since June, when one of those men had died.

No, in the twenty-four-hour news cycle, four Iraqi Air Force pilots flying some bombing runs in a confusing and far-off war didn't merit a mention in the crawl along the bottom of your television screen. And yet to the pilots who flew the missions, and to the rest still in Tucson counting the days before they could return home to do the same, and to their wives and children and mothers and fathers, and to the family of the man whose F-16 crashed in an eruption of flames in the Arizona desert just days before he was supposed to return to Iraq to help lead the fight—to them, it was everything.

"We have to be so precise in order to not have collateral damage, not hit civilians. When we get back home, it's our own cities that we will bomb."

East Valencia Road, a thirteen-mile stretch of strip malls, carnicerías, industrial parks, and chain hotels, runs alongside Tucson International Airport. Three years into their training program, the Iraqi pilots have done their best to fit in here. They live in small apartments near the airport, on the city's south side. Some drive American muscle cars, bought with their pilot salaries. The younger ones have discovered Congress Street, a downtown district full of craft breweries and tequila bars where University of Arizona students go on the weekends. They've also discovered Las Vegas.

The weather is like home, pretty much—dry and hot most of the year, except for a few weeks of summer thunderstorms that locals call the monsoon. The reliable climate makes Tucson a great place to fly. Only 3 percent of all sorties are canceled due to dangerous conditions. Take away the towering saguaros and the Sonoran desert looks a lot like Iraq—especially from the sky. But on the ground America is so much different.

Its mix of skin colors. Everyone free to go about their business—the kids, the groceries, the job, the errands, the night out, the sick day, the golf game, the business trip, the oil change, the early-morning meeting—without worrying about suicide bombers. The Iraqi pilots move among a population unaware of where they're from, of who they are, of what they're doing.

Nawaf has been in the U.S. since 2011. (Nawaf is not his real name. For the protection of his family, his colleagues, and himself, the Iraqi Ministry of Defense allowed him to be interviewed only on the condition of anonymity. Neither would they permit photography of him or the other pilots—or even provide the exact number of pilots in the F-16 training program, though earlier news reports estimated twenty-four.) His family—mom, dad, a sister and two brothers—lives in Sulaymaniyah, though for most of Nawaf's life they lived in Kirkuk, just under seventy miles west, an ancient city as famous for the diversity of its population as for its oil fields. Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians, and Turkomans, Christians and Muslims, Sunni and Shia all live there. Nawaf is a Kurd. Now twenty-five, he was barely a teenager in March 2003, when one thousand members of the U.S. Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade parachuted into Kirkuk to open the northern front in the Iraq War—one of the largest airdrops since World War II. In 1988, near the end of the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein fatally gassed thousands of Kurds. Nawaf's family and neighbors anticipated a similar attack in response to the American invasion. "We were afraid Saddam would do something terrible," he says. "We made gas masks and prepared our cars to flee the city. The car had to be ready with everything in the trunk, even food, 24/7." The chemical attack never came, and Kirkuk was quiet in the early years of the U.S. occupation.

The view from a two-seater D-model F-16

Elliott Woods

Violence increased as Nawaf got older, but that's not why he enrolled in the Iraqi Military Academy in 2008 as an Air Force candidate. His father had been a conscript in Saddam's army and wanted to be an Iraqi Air Force pilot, but there was no chance. Nawaf's father was a Kurd, and Kurds were not allowed to be pilots. "I'm doing this for my dad," Nawaf says.

In September 2011, with American forces pulling out of Iraq and taking their air superiority with them, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki purchased eighteen brand-new F-16s from the U.S. with the goal of rebuilding an Iraqi Air Force capable of defending its own airspace. Two decades earlier, Iraq had been the most feared air power in the Middle East, with more than a thousand aircraft mostly obtained from the Soviets and the French. But after Saddam invaded Kuwait and the Gulf War began, nearly all of Iraq's aircraft were destroyed by the Americans or flown to Iran, first by defecting Iraqi pilots, then under direct orders from Saddam. The ensuing no-fly zones further curtailed the Iraqi Air Force, and the 2003 American invasion completed its destruction. By 2004, the Iraqi Air Force had just thirty-five personnel and zero aircraft.

In December 2011, al-Maliki ordered another eighteen F-16s, bringing the total cost to around $6 billion. This sum included the jets themselves, along with a standard package of 20-mm Vulcan cannons, hundreds of missiles and laser-guided bombs, targeting pods, and all necessary communications and navigation systems. The per-unit sticker price of roughly $165 million also included sending pilots to America for F-16 training. A group of six came first, the others arriving in small groups over the months that followed.

They started at San Antonio's Lackland Air Force Base, where they spent four months learning English. Then it was on to Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, Texas, where they took Undergraduate Pilot Training—the Air Force's introductory flying course—proving themselves on the single-prop T-6 Texan II. From there, they advanced to the dual-jet T-38 Talon at Columbus Air Force Base in Mississippi. Then it was back to San Antonio, this time to Randolph Air Force Base, for eight more months in the T-38, practicing evasive tactics and air-to-air combat. Finally, they headed to Tucson International Airport, home of the 162nd Wing of the Arizona Air National Guard, for the final phase of training in their very own F-16s. The instructors here are some of the most skilled fighter jocks alive, having flown combat missions in Iraq, the Balkans, and Afghanistan, and averaging three thousand hours in the F-16—the equivalent of flying nine-to-five every day for a year. Today, F-16s make up roughly 15 percent of the total aircraft in the world's air forces. For foreign pilots, Tucson is where it begins.

Tucson is where Nawaf was one night in late June, sitting in his one-bedroom apartment watching TV when the phone rang.

"You okay?"

It was one of his American friends. Nawaf said he was fine, thinking his friend was asking about the weight-lifting injury he'd been rehabbing.

No. On the news, his friend said. He'd just seen it. An F-16 had crashed near the Mexican border. Was he okay?

Brigadier General Hasan in his F-16, the same in which he would fatally crash.

Elliott Woods

In photographs, the F-16's smooth contours, compact shape, and sleek gunmetal-gray skin make it appear lightweight and easy to maneuver. Even looking at it up close—measuring a modest forty-nine feet nose-to-tail, with a thirty-three-foot wingspan—it seems like a delicate thing. It's only once you're in the cockpit, enclosed in that seamless bubble canopy, that you start to feel its complexity. Its ferocity. The ten-ton empty weight. The three multifunction displays by the pilot's knees that show a variety of data including thermal video from the targeting pods. The cameras that, at altitude on a clear day, can capture action on the ground from fifty miles away. The head-up display mounted above the instrument panel that allows the pilot to monitor vitals like airspeed, g-force, and bearing without looking down. The single Pratt & Whitney engine delivering over twenty-nine thousand pounds of thrust.

From way up high, it's hard to tell when you're going supersonic. The world appears stationary, like a photograph. It's hard to tell you're moving at all. "It's like you're not sitting in a jet," Nawaf says. "It's like you have wings, and you're flying all by yourself." Until you're rolling into an eight-g turn and feel the blood rush from your head as your g-suit bladders inflate. Or swooping down to five hundred feet, tearing across Tucson pecan orchards and over I-10, the plane's shadow fluttering over speeding cars as if they were parked.

"Now that you're here, you have to study harder than ever. You have to fly better than ever."

The Iraqis spent many hours in the classroom learning skills as basic and necessary as taking off before they got anywhere near an F-16. Nawaf remembers twelve-hour days when he never laid eyes on a plane. Each classroom lesson was followed by simulator time, then finally real-time exercises with an instructor riding in the backseat of a two-seater D-model F-16. Eventually, the Iraqis began flying solo in the same jets they would take with them back to Iraq. They progressed to dogfighting and air-to-ground tactics, adapting skills they'd learned on the T-38 to the F-16. They practiced strafing runs on shipping containers in the nearby Barry M. Goldwater Range. Ground controllers from the U.S. military talked them onto the targets to simulate the kind of complex scenarios they would encounter back home. They learned to use laser-guided bombs as large as two thousand pounds. They also practiced dropping dumb bombs, the kind you have to aim the old-fashioned way, angling your jet in a dive toward the target, then quickly peeling away at an altitude safe from man-portable surface-to-air missiles—like the ones ISIS claims to have discovered in large numbers on captured military bases.

"We have to be so precise in order to not have collateral damage, not hit civilians," Nawaf says. "When we get back home, it's our own cities that we will bomb."

In 2014, Nawaf and the other pilots had watched the news as ISIS emerged, seemingly out of nowhere, to begin systematically tearing Iraq apart. Rolling into Iraqi towns in Humvees seized from fleeing Iraqi troops, waving their black flags. Capturing civilians, soldiers, policemen, and international reporters. The beheadings. That June ISIS claimed its most significant victory yet, seizing Mosul with fifteen hundred men against an Iraqi military force of thirty thousand. From there its fighters pushed into Kurdish territory, their clear objective to overtake Kirkuk, just a hundred or so miles to the southeast. Sulaymaniyah was not far from the advancing ISIS fighters.

Nawaf spoke to his family on the phone every day and they assured him they were okay. His father, who had once dreamed of being a pilot, wanted only to talk about Nawaf's training, always asking what maneuvers he'd practiced and what kind of targets he had attacked. Still, for Nawaf, thoughts of home were filled with uncertainty.

The site near Douglas, Arizona, where Brigadier General Hasan's plane went down

Elliott Woods

The 162nd Wing has trained pilots from the Netherlands, Turkey, Israel, Venezuela, Pakistan, Chile, and many other countries. Those trainees are usually in Tucson seven or eight months. Then they return home to train as wingmen with veteran pilots from their own militaries, until they're deemed "mission qualified"—ready to fly real-life combat missions. The Iraqi pilots couldn't go back home to train with veteran F-16 pilots because there were no veteran F-16 pilots in Iraq. And when the first pilots became mission-ready in 2014, Balad Air Base was not secure. So they stayed in Tucson, rooting for the Spurs, hitting the drive-through at Chickenuevo Mexican Grill, watching and waiting, staying sharp, flying four days a week.

The instructors offer as much reassurance as they can. "Every one of us has been deployed, whether a mobile training team for three months or an overseas deployment for a year," says Major Shayne Sullivan, thirty-seven, an instructor pilot in Nawaf's squadron. "We know how to deal with being away from family. We can talk through that."

Each day before going up in the air, the instructors talk to the foreign students to determine their mental state. With students from, say, Norway or Japan, these informal check-ins could be as mundane as asking what a student had for breakfast. With the Iraqis, the conversations might be about friends and family killed by gunfire or car bombs. If an instructor thinks a student is too rattled, he'll sit out the flight.

"It's like you have wings, and you're flying all by yourself."

Mostly, though, the Iraqi pilots depend on each other for support. They come from different regions—Baghdad, the Kurdish north, the Sunni Triangle, the Shiite south—but they almost never talk about their sectarian identities. They hang out at each others' apartments making Iraqi food, like a stewed beef dish called pima or the Kurdish okra recipe that Nawaf's mother walked him through over the phone.

"We are Iraqis," Nawaf says. "We are family."

The head of that family was Brigadier General Rasid Mohammed Sideeq Hasan, call sign "Fitter," the NATO code name for the Soviet-built Su-20 he'd flown as a young pilot. He was a graduate of the Iraqi Air Force academy but only flew for a short time before Desert Storm and all that followed essentially grounded him for two decades. Now, at forty-five, nearly twice as old as the rest of them, he was back in the cockpit. With his black mustache and gold aviator sunglasses and general's stars on his epaulets, he cut the figure of an old-school officer from the Saddam era. But he was known around the base as an unfailingly warm and gentle man. He treated the young Iraqi pilots like nephews. He was the one they turned to when the grueling training became too much, or when they worried about their families so much it made them sick. Hasan stayed focused. While the others were out revving their V-8s on days off—Nawaf in his red 2014 Dodge Challenger, a 392 Hemi with matte black racing stripes down the hood, a radar detector on the windshield, and a tiny pair of traditional Kurdish shoes dangling from the rearview mirror—Hasan would usually be sitting alone in his bare one-bedroom apartment studying, preparing for his role as Iraq's first-ever F-16 squadron commander.

Hasan had been married as long as some of them had been alive and had four kids, his youngest son born just months before he left. Now, the boy was counting numbers on his fingers—counting the days until Hasan's return. That's what he told his father when they talked over Skype on Wednesday, June 24. In just two days, Hasan was booked on a Turkish Airlines flight back to Iraq. The delivery of the first four F-16s had finally been scheduled for mid-July. He was assigned to be one of the first flight leads. He was supposed to be in one of those F-16s that, come September, would bomb ISIS. But there were still a couple last training flights. Later that night he once more climbed the ladder into his plane, streaked down the runway, and shot off into the Arizona sky.

Nawaf Hung Up with his friend and called one of the other pilots who lived in his building, and they sped toward the airport. When they got to the base, they saw some of their guys standing outside the Iraqi squadron's building. They knew it was Hasan from the flight schedule. They stayed at the squadron building until 1 a.m. before driving to one of their apartments to wait for more news. The plane had gone down near Douglas, an old mining town of seventeen thousand residents just shy of the border, about a hundred miles from the base. Not much there but empty desert and mountains. The Tucson news broadcasts showed a cellphone video shot by a man who lived nearby. The flames were raging—brush fires stoked by the hydrazine in the F-16's emergency power unit, and piles of tires someone had dumped out in the creosote barrens. About 3:30 a.m., the pilots began to drift back to their own apartments. There was still no word about whether Hasan had managed to eject, but they knew how unlikely it was.

Only when the tires finally stopped smoldering a day later were the hazmat teams able to search for a body. No one knew what had gone wrong. It was a routine night training mission, a two-plane formation with an American pilot on one wing. The pair were headed back north to Tucson. An eyewitness told the newspapers he saw the plane bank left and then just all of a sudden tumble out of the sky.

Brigadier General Hasan was the first Iraqi F-16 pilot to die in training and only the second pilot to die in the twenty-three-year history of the 162nd Wing's F-16 program. The Air Force is still investigating.

Master Sergeant Jésus Enriquez had the job of cleaning out Hasan's apartment and packing his belongings for repatriation. Enriquez had bonded with him over the similarities between Arabic and Latino culture. They compared Mexican and Iraqi rice dishes, tortillas and an Iraqi flatbread called samoon. They talked smack about soccer. "He liked the English league," says Enriquez, a fan of the Spanish league. "We would talk about which was harder, who had better players." Mostly, they talked about their children. "I'm a father, he's a father," says Enriquez. "We talked about how much he missed his children and how fast they'd grown. The first thing out of his mouth was always, 'How is your family?' And I do that now—I learned that from him. Every time I meet somebody I ask them, 'How are you, and how is your family?' "

Hasan had made little effort to settle into his apartment, so there wasn't much to pack up. His gold aviators sat on an otherwise empty table.

On July 7, a few weeks after the crash, a Tuesday, a busy workday, about eighty pilots, crew chiefs, and base personnel filled the burgundy folding seats of the 162nd Wing's auditorium. Framed photographs of F-16s and MQ-1 Predator drones hung on the walls. The space was normally used for briefings and promotions. That day it would serve a different purpose. That day it would be the site of a memorial service for Hasan. Enriquez and the Iraqis did their best to make the place worthy of the man. They placed an Iraqi flag beside the U.S. and Arizona flags. They laid flowers on a table beside the stage. They brought in a large portrait of Hasan, standing with his arms crossed in front of his F-16, wearing his aviators.

Lieutenant Colonel Mike Martinez, a Roman Catholic priest and one of the 162nd's chaplains, opened the memorial with a nondenominational prayer. The Iraqi pilots wrote a eulogy. Martinez and Enriquez had helped them compose it. The words showed on a projector screen as an Iraqi pilot read them in Arabic: "General Hasan was our brother and our leader. By his outstanding example, he gave us strength and inspiration to sacrifice for our country."

"We have lost one of our own and we grieve with his family and countrymen," Colonel Phil Purcell, commander of the Wing, told the airmen in attendance, who represented nine countries. "Every fighter pilot works hard to acquire the skills necessary to employ an F-16, but he did it worlds away from his home, his wife, and his children."

Lieutenant Colonel Brant Putnam then followed with a message intended for the Iraqi pilots: "Hasan said that his wish was for Iraqi pilots to be focused and work together in Tucson, so they could fly and fight as one cohesive unit. In so doing, you will become the fighting force your country sent you here to become. And the best part of all is that you will grant General Hasan his wish."

The Iraqis had understood this from the beginning. Nawaf still remembers the speech Hasan had given him when he first showed up in Tucson: "Now that you're here, you have to study harder than ever. You have to fly better than ever." Soon, Hasan constantly reminded the Iraqi pilots, they'd be back home, at the controls of F-16s with the Iraqi flag painted on the tail, dropping ordnance on ISIS.

"He always wanted to make sure that we flew well," says Nawaf. "He wanted us to be good."

The memorial service lasted about forty-five minutes, then everyone went back to work. The Iraqis had been given a week off after the crash to mourn but, ultimately, they found the best way of coping was being in the air. "It's total concentration," says Nawaf. "There's a saying that if you're in the jet and you don't think for a couple of seconds, something's wrong." So they flew.

Elliott Woods

When they finish—when they are mission qualified—the pilots will leave as they came, in groups of four, in pairs, or alone, adding their firepower to the fight against ISIS one F-16 at a time. Nawaf still has another year. The pilots who have returned to Iraq tell him they're thrilled to be doing their jobs at last. Nawaf can't wait to join them, but he's as nervous about going home as he was to come to the U.S. Once he's at Balad Air Base, he won't be allowed to leave because of the risk. And he's gotten used to living alone, to the ease of life here, to the freedom of the American highway. He's planning to bring his Challenger back with him.

Hasan's remains were returned to his family draped in an Iraqi flag. In Tucson, his name was engraved by hand on a polished wall of black granite, a memorial commemorating members of the 162nd Wing who have died. Guys named Dale, Willie, Bruce, James, Harry, Jack.

Hasan, Rasid Mohammed Sideeq. It barely fits on one line. But it fits.

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